For many music fans, it's an iconic '60s image: Jimi Hendrix hunched over a guitar, howling away at ``Purple Haze'' or ``All Along the Watchtower.'' For Jeff Marshall, it's the future.

Matt Lynch

For many music fans, it's an iconic '60s image: Jimi Hendrix hunched over a guitar, howling away at ``Purple Haze'' or ``All Along the Watchtower.''

For Jeff Marshall, it's the future.

Marshall is the vice president of programming for Hobnox, an online media company that has just launched www.Mi145.com, an online music channel with music videos and original programming. The company hopes to launch a social networking site for artists sometime next year.

``We're combining editorialized professional content and social networking to create a media portal we believe will bring us into a new age of online digital media,'' said Marshall, as he sat in the conference room of the company's Waltham office.

One of the centerpieces of the new channel is a documentary of Hendrix's famous 1967 Monterey Pop Festival performance, which Marshall's company has edited to make interactive for the Web.

For example, when a person in the documentary mentions Hendrix's childhood, viewers have an option of clicking a tab on the computer screen to pause the movie and open a two-minute segment of Hendrix's childhood.

Mi145 also has an original reality show, ``Road to the Throwdown'' chronicling the reunion of The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a Boston rock-ska-pop band most famous for the '90s song ``The Impression That I Get.'' Mi145 is also hosting a competition for up-and-coming bands to open for the Bosstones in their New Year's Eve show.

Marshall says Mi145 (the ``Mi'' stands for ``Music Intelligence'') has worked out well since its October launch. Hobnox has tried to create buzz by spreading the word at the club and concert circuit rather than traditional advertising.

``We're in a very organic growth phase,'' said Marshall. ``We have the one standalone channel, reaching out to the community associated with types of music on Mi145.''

Hobnox's gamble -- and an emerging trend -- is that people will turn to the Internet as a primary source of video entertainment, a shift that has already occurred for news, according to Sasha Norkin, a Boston University communications professor who specializes in online and new media.

``I asked my students, in a class of about 150 kids, when something big happens, where do you go for the latest news?'' she said. ``About three kids raised their hands for television and everyone else said the Internet. We're already seeing a huge shift in where people go for video information, and I see the same thing happening in video entertainment.''

That would be music to the ears of Hobnox officials, especially since those students are the very audience the company is targeting with Mi145 and a social networking platform the company hopes to launch in the first quarter of next year.

The Waltham office is the company's only American location, chosen in large part because of its proximity to Boston, arguably the world's largest college town.

``It's a great place to tap into,'' said Marshall.

Even with the resources afforded by Boston's lively music scene, the company still faces challenges, especially for the long-term success of Mi145.

While the runaway success of YouTube shows the public is more than willing to watch short bursts of video entertainment on the Web, sitting through an hourlong documentary or building an audience for ``Road to the Throwdown'' is a different matter, said Norkin.

``The challenge is how you get people to watch longer-form video on a site they've never heard of,'' she said. ``It's the same struggle for any site - getting people there and, once there, interesting them enough to stay. Then, there's interesting them enough to come back and to tell their friends.''

See Jimi Hendrix play at Monterey Pop
http://www.mi145.com/index.html?episode=366

Matt Lynch can be reached at 508-490-7453 or mlynch@cnc.com.

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